A Perfect Distance
by Wilhelmina Willoughby
Summary: AU. James Potter is the (self-proclaimed) best thief in Britain—until he meets Lily Evans. When his group of Marauders reluctantly team up with her H.O.G.W.A.R.T.S. acquisition task force, they must work together to steal back a highly valuable asset from a shady black market organization.
1. One

James is one of the best thieves in the world—if not The Best—and he's not going to let a malfunctioning heat monitor stop him from getting inside this room. Shit piece of equipment. If he wasn't currently wedged inside an air duct, he would head back to the van and throw it at Peter's head.

Exhaling as quietly as he can, he turns the heat monitor off and wiggles around so that he can place it back inside his pocket. It's not necessary, anyway. He's memorized the schematics of the entire museum and knows that, just below him and a bit to the left, is a glass case with five of the rarest pink diamonds that've yet been found. A near guaranteed jackpot. In five seconds, according to his watch, the guards in the room will be pulled away by a severe security breakdown at the front of the building, caused by Sirius, and James will have the go-ahead to slip in, attached to the air duct by a thin cord and hook.

Five seconds pass, the alarm sounds, and Sirius, breathless, yells into his earpiece, "ALL CLEAR! GO! Oh, God, these fuckers are HUGE—"

James pushes himself head-first into the open vent. He flips, expecting the cord to pull taut, but doesn't get to his hook in time and falls flat on his back, breath caught in his chest.

But the laser-targeting system that is supposed to be guarding the floor space in front of the display case doesn't go off. James looks around, still choking for breath, and stills when he sees a pair of boots come into his line of sight.

And looks up, up, up a long pair of slim legs and a skin-tight, black jumpsuit. It's a woman—a curvy, sexy woman, with night-vision goggles perched upon her head, with fire-red hair and laughing green eyes. Wordlessly she steps over him, places a small device over the case lock, and waits for it to beep open.

"Prongs?" Remus, in his ear, voice loud and frayed: "Prongs, mission status?"

The woman's device beeps, and the lock clicks open. She opens the case. No. No, these are _his _diamonds, dammit, _his, _and he is not going to let her best him—

He takes in a rattling breath and sweeps his leg out, hoping to catch her by surprise and take out her ankles, but instead she jumps. He's pinned on his back before he can blink, the woman leaning over him, her ponytail falling and brushing against the side of his face. She smells like vanilla and motor oil and he just looks at her—pale skin, freckles, flecks of blue in her eyes—while Remus yells in his earpiece something about the mission and Sirius being afraid of the dark and what's going on with the diamonds, where are the diamonds?

"So you must be the infamous James Potter," the woman says, scrutinizing him. She's still perched atop him, hands pressed against his chest, and if James wasn't already intrigued, she sits back, near in his lap, and smirks. "Aren't you a sight."

"Can't complain about the view from here," he says, lifting his hands to her thighs. The moment his fingers brush across the slick-smooth length of her thigh, she rolls her eyes, stands, and steps back. His watch beeps, signaling the end of the safe period, letting him know he needs to get his ass back into the air vent and out of the building. She must've been wasting time with him, biding her own time. Clever. Without taking her eyes from his, she slowly reaches into the case and takes the diamonds, slips them into a side pocket on her belt, and snaps it shut.

It's the sexiest thing that's ever happened to him.

"Let's not make this a thing," she tells him, shutting the case, taking her device from the lock. She wraps a wire around her wrist and starts to back away, toward the only door in the room. Clever and brave, and a nice arse, and he doesn't even know her name.

"Maybe we ought to." He stands. He runs a hand through his sweaty hair, slides his clip up the cord attaching him to the air vent. "Miss…?"

She smiles. Actually, genuinely smiles. "Call me Evans. And tell your man out front he's running straight into an ambush. Embarrassing, really." He risks two valuable seconds to watch her saunter away.

And James Potter, self-proclaimed Master Thief, sets his eyes on his next project.


	2. Two

The next time he runs into her, it's four months later—he's not been counting, really, only paying attention to the passing days he fails to track her down and get his diamonds back, _not counting_—and he almost doesn't recognize her. She's clearly undercover: a long brown wig covers her hair, colored contacts conceal her eyes, and she's dressed in a long brown dress and an admittedly hideous pink and green sweater. But it's her walk that James recognizes, the straight spine, the confidence, the precise way her hips move back and forth.

She made an impression on him, what can he say.

Peter, in his earpiece: "Eyes on a rogue coming at you from one o'clock."

James nods. Peter's talking about Evans, doesn't know that the memory of her that night four months ago lives in the most active part of James's memory. Red hair pulled into that tight ponytail, black jumpsuit stretched against her skin, the heat of her thighs under his hands. A shiver traces down his spine and James has to shake himself out of it, has to focus on Evans, in the flesh, coming right at him at a fast clip.

He doesn't move out of her way. She runs into him, full-contact; it's a jumble of arms and legs and too much sweater, and before pulling away, she slides a scrap of paper into his hand. He slips it into his pocket, unnoticed.

"Excuse me, ma'am," he says, holding onto her arm. "Terribly sorry."

She nods and continues walking, head ducked down, muttering to herself. Staying in character, talking to her own team—who knows. James strolls around the lobby of the hotel for half a minute, walks over to the glass-walled room where they've placed an internet café and a row of telephones, and pretends to make a call while he pulls the note from his pocket.

_Third-floor storage closet, 2:34._ _Leave your cronies out of it._

A lover's tryst! James laughs at himself. "Mates, I've got a side-thing to do," he tells them through the earpiece, holding the phone to his other ear as cover. "Just need to pop out for a minute or two. No worries."

As predicted, Peter starts to cite protocol. "Prongs, you can't really—"

"Will be back in a mo'," he says, hanging up the phone like that's going to stop the conversation. Peter keeps talking but James lifts a finger to his earpiece and taps the connection off. They can yell at him later. He's got too much excited energy to take the elevator—it's Evans, she's here, he's meeting her in a closet, it doesn't even matter—so he jogs up the two flights of stairs and looks around for whatever storage closet she might be talking about.

Around the corner, and a few steps from the elevators, he sees a door marked _PERSONNEL ONLY._

Evans is waiting for him when he opens the door. Sitting on an up-turned bucket, arms crossed, glaring, dressed in that hideous outfit. He knew it was her. He can feel the stupid smile on his face. As he shuts the door behind him, enclosing them in the dimly-lit room, he holds up her note and says, "This is slightly less sexy than the first time we met. A storage closet, Evans?"

"Yeah. Shut up." She stands, steps forward. "Look. My team and I had a meeting about your little group of marauders—"

"Actually, we're _called _the Marauders, you know, proper noun—"

"And we want you to stay out of our territory."

He crosses his arms this time and leans against the door, glad that he is physically blocking her exit. There's no doubt that she could probably kick his ass twenty different ways in such a small space—no doubt that she probably wants to—but at least this way she knows that he means business. "Now, see, that doesn't feel fair. We've been operating in this area for years now, and we've never seen you here. Feels to me this is our territory."

Evans moves in closer. She has to look up to meet his gaze, and he likes how small and how big she seems, all at once. Perhaps it's the lack of space between their bodies that makes him place his hands on her hips, pull her closer; perhaps it's because he hasn't seen her in so long, because she's taken up so much space in his mind, because he's been so consumed with wanting to know her.

Her smirk does bad, bad things to him. "That's the point, isn't it, Potter—not to be seen?"

Well, yes, but—_oh. _It all clicks into place, somehow. Though she hadn't said much at all, that smirk on her face and the sly way she said his name triggers an epiphany. It's been them this entire time, hasn't it? All the things that've gone wrong with his operations throughout the years when he knows they've been overprepared, all the times he and his team have gotten to their location to find it's already been locked down, all the times they've had technical issues with their equipment, all the times they've gotten out just before getting caught—it's been Evans and her gang, mucking everything up.

With a laugh light as air, Evans pats him on the shoulder, pushes him aside, and leaves him behind in the storage closet.

He's only figured it all out now because she allowed him to see it.

And now, at 2:37, he's late for his part of the plan, and Sirius is probably going to kill him—because Evans wasn't the point-man for their operation, was she? She was his distraction.

And it worked.

**.o.O.o.**

Evans and her team beat them to the money extraction. Another loss. Sirius refuses to talk to James, and Peter keeps casting him dark looks, but that's okay, because James has an ace up his sleeve that is going to fix everything, and that is this: he slipped a small tracking chip onto Evans' skin, right when he pulled her closer in that storage closet. Now they can find her and get back what's theirs.

Remus is the only one willing to get excited and help. He gets into the passenger seat of James's car, laptop in front of him, and navigates. Eventually, after giving initial directions, he says, "You can't keep getting distracted like this. It's interfering with our work, and the other blokes are getting frustrated."

James takes a right turn too sharply. "I _know_, Remus. You think I don't know I'm fucking up? I know I'm fucking up. But this girl—she's just—"

"A distraction."

Yeah, okay, so she's a distraction. But she's _more _than a distraction, more than their rival; she's clever and beautiful and so _good_ at the job, and he can't stop thinking about her, even if she makes him angry, even if she's starting to ruin his life, even if she just cost him millions of dollars.

Again.

James doesn't say anything more. He'd rather brood than listen to Remus harping at him. As always, Remus takes it in stride and guides them around, eventually leading them to an alley in East London. But there's nothing there. It's just an alleyway between an abandoned apartment building and some business offices. James leaves the car idling and gets out, steps into the alley, and sees Evans's ugly pink-green sweater in a trash bin, the flesh-colored tape with the embedded tracking chip stuck to one of the buttons. There's also a flash drive the size of his thumbnail tied to the tag.

_That crazy—not again—_

A hot pressure blooms in his chest. He kicks the trash bin. He'll find her. And they'll have a Talk, one that doesn't take place in a smelly, dim storage closet, and one that doesn't involve her pulling the wool over his eyes, and he will tell her what he thinks about her, trickery and all.

"Come on, mate," Remus calls from the open car window.

"Evans left this," James grumbles, getting into the car. He tosses the ugly sweater into the backseat and waves the flash drive at Remus. "Maybe she left a bloody apology note. She ought to, with all she's putting me through! 'Sorry I'm driving you bloody fucking crazy, Potter!' Would be nice!"

"I'd be careful with that. She might've put malware—"

James rolls his eyes and sets the drive into the computer. He doesn't know where his confidence in her comes from, hates that he's feeling it at all. "She didn't put any malware onto it."

On it is a single file, titled _BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME; _it is a photo of her holding up his tracking device and blowing a kiss into the camera. He sits back and stares at it. There's got to be _something _he can use, here.


End file.
